Imagine Telling the Devs To Scrap Another League, Again (Harvest ̶i̶s̶ was Amazing for Many Reasons)

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Aldonés wrote:

Chris Wilson said before Harvest even launched it likely wouldn’t go core because it was too powerful...

Completely missed the point of my whole post as the majority of these same counter-arguments I keep hearing are moving the goalposts of what I am arguing. I literally wrote/addressed this in bold text of the post... Try actually reading the post next time, thanks.

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MLGonthorian wrote:

... I was understanding of the decision to not make Harvest go core because of the harm it would do to the game's economy and burnout with the changing of mods on armor and weapons, but I thought at the least GGG would see value in making the garden itself go core and keeping the nonharmful crafts like changing your gear's color, sockets, links, infused beachheads that came with upgradable harbinger uniques, infused labyrinths that came with fun new difficult and belt enchants, infused currency like infused engineers orbs, facetor len's (amazing for transferring exp from one gem to another), new bestiary lures that allowed you to specifically target certain beast, winged scarabs, etc.

People might argue that the garden to them is something they don't like or don't want to do every league, but these were all complaints about previous league mechanics that people are not used to yet and then later once devs decided to get rid of them, people later on complained and it was brought back (bestiary for example, people at first said they did not like bestiary, but they brought it back, just without the nets, which was a good compromise at least) ...

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Aldonés wrote:

Plus, Harvest has terrible retention.

I love how people throw this around whenever they clearly have a hatred for a league given it's not the usual brainless activity of killing things without giving it much thought that they are used to, but then don't link any actual data to back up their claims or if they do, they link some flawed or biased statistics that has nearly the same numbers if any difference at all in the numbers.

And don't even get me started on the players who either did not even try Harvest or have little to no challenges, meaning they did not bother to even engage with the league mechanic and they are going to go on here and tell that "league is bad" when they did not even bother trying out the league or tried it for a very short amount of time without an open mind and decided "oh, too complicated/not simple enough for me" or "I don't like the deviance from regular killing where it doesn't take much thinking"

On top of this, as I've said previously, I don't get how the devs can put out something fun and creative like the garden in the game, get people used to its mechanics and not see the value in making it core with 3.12, but then other leagues like Delirium, Metamorph, etc. get put core easily into the game, because it doesn't take as much effort to balance into the game and also because it fits the genre of an ARPG more. I was fine with this cutting of content from the game happening the first couple of times, but I don't want to feel this same thing anymore again, where at the end of a league, I'm just told all of this fun content I played will be gone or "introduced again in the future", which means most likely a very long time before it is brought back and who knows how much altered into what it was originally, which people fell in love with.

Alright, let’s make this simple. The garden cannot stay. It is too much of a resource hog on the servers. The league would have had to be a massive success to make I financially worthwhile to maintain. My comment about retention is based of Steam charts. Sure, it doesn’t track everyone, but it shows a very good trend, and Harvest had a very bad go. Yup, I did very little this league, got burned out last league and still recovering, but I’m only 1 of over 100,000 Steam is tracking so my contribution is a bit insignificant.

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Aldonés wrote:

Alright, let’s make this simple.

Except, it's not simple, it's a lot more complicated than you want it to be with more determining factors than you realize. There are people, whether you want to believe it or not, who DID enjoy the Harvest content, not just for the crafting, but for the role-playing aspect of gardening as well, that offered something different for once than the usual mind-numbing content of just killing things in different ways that we keep getting from most leagues. If you don't want to take my word for it, here is an example of a post of another player arguing for the literal exact thing I am saying in this post https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2933111, which is only one example by the way, of many that are expressing their concern of content being taken out of the game that DOES have a place in the game and actually enhances it by offering us more side activities to engage in if we want.

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Aldonés wrote:

The garden cannot stay. It is too much of a resource hog on the servers.

With that kind of mentality, you are claiming that the devs may as well throw out any type of new league content in the future then, according to you, because it's a "resource hog" or let me guess, my favorite argument "content bloat" where someone can actually argue that having more things to do in the game or more choices, in general, is somehow a negative aspect, this is so absurd that it is beyond comprehension. Why even have more leagues in the future then if you just label a new system a "resource hog" on the servers. This doesn't sound limiting to you? Should we just start taking away all of the content that players grew to love and played throughout the years? You don't think this will cause players to start leaving the game at all? Because I can guarantee at least some players will start leaving out of just frustration of having content taken away that they enjoyed.

In addition, you alone are not the sole determining factor in whether something stays in the game or not, as it is decided by the devs mostly as well as feedback from players and in some instance even, even when leagues have initial negative feedback, the devs STILL put the content back into the game as they did with Betrayal, which also did not have the best initial perception from everyone.

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Aldonés wrote:

The league would have had to be a massive success to make I financially worthwhile to maintain.

You are saying this as if the potential monetary value from the league's success is the only thing that matters to the devs when they have stated multiple times on Baeclast episodes that they make the game that THEY would like to play. They have a good amount of resources and financial backing from players, Tencent, and other sources. If they themselves wanted to add a league mechanic in the game, they would, not only because of financial incentives.

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Aldonés wrote:

My comment about retention is based of Steam charts. Sure, it doesn’t track everyone, but it shows a very good trend, and Harvest had a very bad go.

Again, flawed and biased statistics based on only Steam, when the majority of players play from the regular/main client and even then, even if somehow hypothetically the numbers were lower, which they weren't significantly, this would also not be the only determining factor in just abandoning a league, as the devs themselves said that Harvest will come back eventually once they decide which crafts to keep/balance. Thus, this point is also moot.

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Aldonés wrote:

Yup, I did very little this league, got burned out last league and still recovering, but I’m only 1 of over 100,000 Steam is tracking so my contribution is a bit insignificant.

So then this doesn't sound flawed in logic to you either? How much can you really accurately comment on or have a valid opinion based on merit about the league if you did not even bother experiencing it? Not experiencing the league in any major capacity and then claiming the league is bad or doesn't belong in the game does not sound illogical to you?

I can keep going on about this, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to the game having more content to engage with that we can experience that the developers have put their blood, sweat, and tears into making something amazing for us to play. There is no point in my opinion, to only experience and learn new, fun, and immersive content in only a 3-month span of a league just to have it be removed, as the content should be core, at least in some capacity in the game so that players have more choices in terms of side content to engage in if they choose and that the developers themselves don't feel like they wasted making all of the content either just to be told it won't be implemented into the game after the players only had the chance to experience it for 3 months if that and never having the opportunity to play the content again.

It's ironic seeing the same people who bashed leagues like Bestiary or Synthesis in the past, coming back to Reddit months later saying how they miss the same content that they initially disapproved. Players are just hesitant with change too much when it's something fun and creative that they are not used to. Then when it gets taken away, only then do people realize what they truly had.

can ppl stop bringing up only half of the steamchart thing?

yes the first drop was bigger than other leagues,but ppl that stayed stayed a lot longer on average.

so calling harvest a failure is wrong (in my opinion atleast)

if you think about poe´s future harvest had a lot more value than the lootpiniata leagues
the data how and if pll interacted with the crafting can be used for a more balanced crafting option in the future,where the lootpinatas are just that lootpinatas.

I’ll miss Harvest. But I think it simply comes down to GGG needing more time to figure out how to balance it - imo cap crafting at t2 mods for example, plus a lot of other details and qol - and they needed to spend their time on Heist instead. Plus COVID.

Like many issues with this (or any) game I imagine its basically a staff capacity problem.

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demon9675 wrote:

I’ll miss Harvest. But I think it simply comes down to GGG needing more time to figure out how to balance it - imo cap crafting at t2 mods for example, plus a lot of other details and qol - and they needed to spend their time on Heist instead. Plus COVID. Like many issues with this (or any) game I imagine its basically a staff capacity problem.

A lot of what you said is fair and I hold the same view. Maybe the COVID restrictions did have some play in Harvest not being balanced enough in time to go core, but it sounds more to me like some of their staff decided this type of role-playing content they don't want to see in the game, which they would never disclose publically, when other players do like this type of alternative content in the game, and the devs decided to just take it away and re-introduce it in the future in likely some non-creative way as they did with Synthesis.

What excuse did the devs have for not bringing Synthesis back into the game? Because as far as I'm concerned, they never brought back Synthesis, they just put 4-5 Synthesis themed areas into 4-5 maps with all the Synthesis uniques coming from these 4-5 maps and called it a day. Keep in mind, it took them 1 full year to "bring back" Synthesis and it was not even brought back, but rather put into some low drop chance maps that you never get and people only run for the customized synthesized unique rings and The Bottled Faith Flask. What happened to the Synthesis area with Cavas and all the lore that came with it? The Synthesis Board with the tile making of your own areas with the puzzle game. The Synthesizer implicit crafting. These were all things players complained about at first but learned to love in the end and pleaded for it to come back after it was gone. The devs then used this negative feedback as leverage to not have to spend the time to put Synthesis as a main side activity in the game like they did with Delve. On top of Synthesis probably being too much work for them to work into the game and perhaps a resource hog, but it's shameful in my opinion for the devs to just give up on it and not bring it back in its full form.

It's the continuous removal of content like this that causes players enough frustration to move on to other games that have more stable content cycles and content that doesn't just get thrown out when players want it to stay. Otherwise, why bring content in the game in the first place when players get attached to it, learn its mechanics, and at the end of the league just told that they will never have the opportunity to play the content they enjoyed again.

Harvest was the best league I ever played in PoE.
I've played since betrayal, and this is the first league I was playing from start to finish.

I enjoyed 95% of the content that was added.
Also fuck steam who cares, most of the people that play poe dont even use the steam client to play it.

Harvest literally invalidates any progression/difficulty in the game, and you're trying to defend it with your essay argument? [Removed by Support]

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skillcode wrote:

Harvest literally invalidates any progression/difficulty in the game, and you're trying to defend it with your essay argument? I'd be ashamed if I was you.

Thats a bit disingenuous.

Even with harvest you did not get perfect items instantly as everyone claims.
The reality is that people got perfect items...

After running thousands of seeds to get the crafts needed.

There was still progression to be had. you had to roll a good version of the mod you wanted and in many cases .. you did not get that roll.

You could run out of crafts.. easily. And the desirable seeds were not cheap.

There were also still many ways to brick an item in such a way that only a roll of the dice would salvage it.

I got to 36 probably made and spent 100 - 200 exalted this league

I will probably only be taking a set and a half of worthy items to standard. not perfect.. worthy.

1 and a half characters worth of stuff.. for 2 builds .. out of thousands.

And I did not put a small amount of effort in either.

Harvest is a shortcut to be sure. but to say it eliminates everything like some sort of magic cheat code? No.

Never done as much crafting, and actually learnt a lot from Harvest. So that brings up 2 things that will make this coming league feel mediocre at best.

1. With all the new experimental bases and enchants, there will be a significant multiplier on rolls during crafting. Orb spam crafting was already tedious, before we were teased with Harvest, now it's going to suck big hairy balls.

2. Thanks to the Harvest craft tease, a lot of people had first contact with good items, and experienced how much it influences builds. So now with the system back, and arguably worst crafting than before Harvest, there will be a lot more focus on this stupid and broken trade system. a Lot more scamming and a lot more struggle with people responding to trades they listed.

To make it worst, there is now private leagues. So a lot of those that could actually craft good items will be playing in their own leagues.